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Margaret I. Carr

Omniscience and your characters

We create them therefore we know everything about them, right? Well....

Some writers do carefully 'build' their characters but others find them pretty much fully realized emerging in their minds and demanding that their stories be told. Most of us are somewhere in between. We may start out with a character or a plot idea or a setting that we want to use and construct the rest as we go.

Their lives are an open book.

In order to be 'all-knowing' about our characters we will have to find out 'everything' about them. If we are 'designing' them we can use Character Charts or Questionaires to establish how they look, what their background is and anything else that we need to know for our story.

But it is written in a code we have to decipher.

What if they simply arrived in our mind? This can be particularly annoying when they keep demanding we tell their story but get coy about telling us what it is. This is where the Interview technique can be a very useful tool. Just deciding on what questions we would like to ask our character can be very helpful. Take the scene suggestion from last month, the people standing in line waiting for a ticket office to open. A few minutes before it is due to open someone walks up to the first person in line, hands over an envelope and steps in front of him/her.

How many books?

Technically, if we really are trying for Omniscience, we should know everything about everyone in the line. That seems a bit impractical. It could take months to figure all of them out and that seems excessive for a simple scene. Perhaps we should concentrate on the characters who will be important to the scene.

How do we know which characters are important?

Since we are focussing on character in this scene and a conflict situation tends to be very revealing of character we want to choose the characters who will be active either overtly or covertly. It may seem that the first person in line and the one who steps in front are the most active but how revealing of character are their actions? It may be more interesting to understand those further back in line. Now we have something to work with. Are the characters we choose going to do something, say something or just silently fume? The author knows what is going on but the characters are not omniscient.

Choices.

Writing is essentially a matter of making choices. We choose to create or resolve tension by what we reveal to the reader. If we reveal too much we can lose all the suspence and end up losing the reader entirely. So, before we choose to tell all we need to think carefully about whether the loss of tension will serve our purpose.

Margaret I. Carr